Imani Perry will deliver the 2026 Community MLK Celebration keynote address on January 22 at The Paramount Theater.
Those of us who come from people whose past has been deemed unworthy have often found ourselves fighting for preservation in order to be counted,” writes Imani Perry in Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. She continues, “Our preservation commitments insist upon fuller and often more accurate stories than what empires tell about themselves.”
True to this reflection, Perry’s work as a scholar and writer consistently focuses on stories that honor Black humanity and history in America, with roots across the globe. Infused with deep curiosity about the people and places she includes, her books are written for us all—work that is more important than ever in our current political climate, where empire runs unchecked and people across the country are at heightened risk.
In recognition and support of her work, Perry has received a MacArthur “genius” grant as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim and Pew foundations. She is the author of nine books, including South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction. A journey through the stories, places, and rituals of the American South, South to America, which Perry discussed at the Virginia Festival of the Book, is a deeply researched, personal work that invites readers to deepen our understanding of the history and culture of this region in order to better understand our country as a whole.
Black in Blues builds on the work she shared in South to America, weaving together histories and artifacts to create a magnificent tapestry—this time centering the color blue as a connecting thread through Black culture.
Perry describes the book as more “experimental and expansive” than her past work, but it is also more intimate. In it, she writes, “I wasn’t constructing a story; I was revealing and witnessing, quilting something present. Along the way, I learned much more than I already knew … And that is in this book. In it, loose threads and frayed patches are as important as seamless compositions and straight-stitched stories. Perhaps more so, because life is neither tidy nor done; it is doing.” She adds, “You might be thinking by now that this blue thing I’m talking about is mere device, a literary trick to move through historic events … But, for real, the blue in Black is nothing less than truth before trope.”
The blues in Perry’s Black in Blues range from blues music and its genre descendants to Black creatives making use of the color blue in their sculpture, paintings, novels, and other artistic work. She finds evidence across time and place, from Webster’s blue-black speller that made Black education and literacy more accessible for many during Reconstruction and Jim Crow, to the blue flowers growing atop the otherwise unmarked graves of enslaved people; from Haiti, Ghana, and the Congo Free State, to the root of the term “crimes against humanity” and the establishment of international human rights. It is a book that embraces linked fates, collective mourning, and shared joy.
Black in Blues is also a personal accounting, an expedition of self-exploration, a memorial, and a look to the future. Perry includes her own life, family, and experience in the book, offering personal stories, but also inviting the reader into her meditations on the meaning of this work, the challenges and the strength she draws from the stories she shares.
“I was enchanted,” writes Perry. “I continue to be, at each new beautiful blue story in the plethora of Black art pieces and forms … But I had to stop to finish this book. And to remember that the point was not to document them all, but to attend to what these artists teach, in sound and color, about the human condition. I think I know: this tradition I’ve devoted myself to exploring and explaining is the place where imagination is excited into faith and deed. Conjurers survive conquerors.”
After all, the work of preservation is one of survival. Through the pages of Black in Blues, Perry returns time and again to the atrocities that have been perpetrated against Black people, to the myriad ways that the pursuits of empire and white people have perpetrated violence and erasure. And still, in the face of it all, Black art, ingenuity, and community continue to evolve and grow, to grapple with the past and dream a better future. Perry writes, “The real question I ask is, how is it that we keep our hearts and souls reaching? Because that is what is worth saving. Black Americans are a people, but a very young one. We are older than the United States … but younger than the Yoruba or Ibo people.” Elsewhere in the book, she writes, “We have no choice but to contend with our past inside our present.”
